Grossing over $62 million off a $3 million budget, Scott Derickson directed supernatural horror film Sinister is well on its way to following other Blumhouse Productions flicks Paranormal Activity (cost: $3,000, box office: over $193 million) and Insidious (cost: $1.5 million, box office: over $97 million) into serious sequel territory.

“We’re in the process of doing that,” confirmed Derickson, speaking exclusively to SciFiNow. “I certainly want to write the script and be involved with it as the producer – I would possibly direct the next one, we’ll see.”

The odds of Sinister spiralling off into a never-ending franchise of diminished returns (see Saw, Hostel and almost everything ever), seem at the moment to be slim.

“But I don’t see myself just handing the franchise over to just anybody and letting it go,” adds the director. “If it goes on – then maybe – but I want to see it start its process on the right foot at least, and always have some say and have some involvement in it.”

Sinister‘s co-writer, novelist C Robert Cargill added, “Before we finished the movie Scott and I had a discussion about the things we don’t want to do, and spitballed just a couple of things that we would like to do given the opportunity, but it’s all still theoretical stages – ‘Oh, hey, wouldn’t that be cool’ – everyone’s still waiting to see on the lifecycle of the movie how everything pans out before everybody jumps up and says, ‘Yes! We must have a second one!’”

As a movie critic turned movie writer – Sinister is his first screenplay, but first of many with a host of projects lined up as part of his creative “bromance” (his words) with Scott Derickson – Cargill is well aware how these franchises turn out. Is he worried about Sinister 6, the one where they go into space?

“You know, it’s weird – I’m in two different minds,” muses Cargill, “there’s part of me that has that concern – you have this creation and then it spins off and gets a life of its own through sequels and trying to find new ways to do the same story again. But at the same time, audiences really love their horror sequels and will keep watching them over and over again until it’s been completely run into the ground, until you have to send it into space. And then it’s like ‘Ahhhh maaaaaan, all they have left is space, forget this franchise – let’s move onto the next one!’

“You look at what happened, Sinister came out here in the States, a week before Paranormal Activity 4 and twice as many people went out to see the fourth instalment of a franchise than they did to see a brand new movie that was unlike any of the stories that they’d watched before made by several of the same people [Sinister was produced by Paranomal Activity’s Jason Blum, Jeanette Brill, and Jessica L Hall], because they wanted to see that same movie over again.

“So as an artist you want to do something new and different,” the writer continues, “but at the same time you also want to give the audience what they want, and sometimes that’s what they want. I’m straddling the line on that whole concept of which way to go, and ultimately what it all comes down to is ‘Can we make it good enough to warrant it existing?’ so that people don’t look at it and go, ‘Oh, there’s no reason for this’, but you want them to go, ‘Oh, hey, yes, no, not only do I want to go see that but this is the direction I want it to go’.

“If you had asked me before Final Destination 2 came out if there needed to be a Final Destination 2 I would have said, ‘No way, c’mon, why do we need that? We’ve already seen Final Destination, it’s just gonna be more of the same’. But then Final Destination 2 improved actually on the first film and made the first film better, and then after that… it was never quite as good. Sometimes it can really pay off.”